Thursday, March 29, 2012

Disabled or Not Able By Employer Standards?

I've struggled wit this little question for a while now.  Am I disabled or is it just the view of all the employers I've had that I don't work up to their standards, whatever that is?  Every job I've had for the most part has had the employer let me go before my diagnosis for reasons I couldn't see up till now.  The last one, I can see the problem more clearly and others in the past, not so much.  "You're not working up to our standards," seems to be the basic reason that it comes down to.

I had a job that was unfortunately only going to be a temp job anyway.  In this job I was more or less running this easy peasy software that allowed me to scan in accounting records for (unnamed company), because they were in legal trouble.  The documents, as far as I could tell, went in without a hitch and even a few around me said they could believe they were getting paid so much for this job, because it was easy.  So why did they let me go?  It was easy, right?  I certainly thought it was.  But here comes that bare bones answer.  "You weren't working up to our standards."  Could they be any less clear?  I didn't even think to ask them why and I don't know if it would have mattered anyway.  I was let go and that was that.

Some things do restrict me.  Working at a grocery store was a bad move.  I worked there awhile till the sensory overload got the better of me and I kept telling myself at the end that I wasn't giving up, but they asked me to quit, but there's where I knew why.  It's a social job that I was doing or rather wasn't doing very well at.  I certainly wasn't the man for the job.

So what about other jobs.  What made me so bad that I couldn't scan simple documents?  I can see some of my disabilities, but surely I can have a job doing something and make a simple living.  I know I can.  First there are so few jobs that I can take advantage of around here, so that makes one thing difficult and the other thing I kind of question whether society has something to do with it.  Yes, an employer must, if they can, accommodate for you once hired, if hired.  But I would need some assistance to get into these jobs.  Also a lot of jobs, if I'm not mistaken, need to have at least a couple disabled people to show they are accommodating.

One part of society looks down on me saying "Get a job!"   And then there's the employers of America saying "You don't work to our standards."  What a dilemma.  Society can see that I can work.  I can see my strengths and weaknesses.  But employers just look at potential employees and are very critical.  You just can't win in the job world when it comes to having Aspergers.

So, what is it?  Neurodiverse minded people say it's our society's fault and we are not disabled.  While the other people, and I sit in the middle wondering, say they are disabled, because we have weaknesses.

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